High-tech sports bras had humble start

June 07, 2006|JANET CROWLEY Los Angeles Times

From humble beginnings -- the first modern sports bra was fashioned from two jockstraps sewn together -- the sports brassiere has emerged as a high-tech apparel powerhouse. A triumph of engineering over gravity, these pieces of fabric are now researched to the minutest detail. Some are even tested in biomechanical labs with cameras rolling. Just one bra can include eight types of fabrics, with varying amounts of support, sweat-wicking properties and ventilation levels. As a category, they're made with microfibers to reduce friction. Even the straps are engineered, some with gel inside for cushioning. These advances have been fueled by the growing expectations -- and changing needs -- of active women and by researchers who have made breast bounce analysis and nipple-tracking a fine art. One of those scientists, LaJean Lawson, has been conducting sports bra research at Oregon State University's biomechanics lab for nearly 20 years. Today she is an adjunct professor in exercise and sports science and works with Champion Athleticwear to test and improve sports bra designs. To test a bra, Lawson relies on volunteers with varying breast sizes. The women jog on a treadmill while cameras around them feed data into a computer. Lawson is able to track the motion of breasts to the smallest detail. At the end of each trial, Lawson has simulated figures of the subject's body in motion and the breasts moving up and down. She can track in slow motion every twist and turn of breasts, which tend to move in a figure-eight pattern that reflects the arm swing and shoulder rotation during running. "We can tell you how fast the nipple is going as it changes direction," she says. "We can calculate velocity and acceleration." In fact, she says, some of the data are scary. "Think of when you play crack the whip," she says. "The skin and much of the underlying tissue in the breast is somewhat elastic, so when you have a breast traveling downward at a pretty good rate of speed, and then you change direction as your body hits the ground and begins to rise up again, you can get some pretty drastic acceleration as the breast speeds up to try to catch up with the rest of the body. The point of the sports bra is just to slow all that down." The average 36C breast is estimated to weigh about 10 ounces. Researchers calculate that a breast of this size, with minimal support, running at about 5.6 mph, will bounce as much as 4.7 inches up and down, relative to trunk movement. A good sports bra can decrease this by about half or more. Today, Lawson says, breasts are moving differently in the bras that she's used as control garments over the years. This is due, she suspects, to a higher ratio of fat-to-glandular tissue in the breast. As women have become larger, breasts have followed suit. In the last 10 years, breasts have increased from an average bra size of 34B to 36C or 38C. To fully understand the breast, one must start with the connective tissue, called Cooper's ligaments, that separate its lobules. Researchers believe that these ligaments, along with collagen and skin tissue, give the breast its gravity-defying structure. Over time, however, as tissues become less elastic, breasts lose their perky resilience. A sports bra, in theory, should slow the advent of sagging. Artwork and relics from Greek and Roman antiquity suggest that active women through the ages have addressed the problem of bouncing breasts, says Kevin Jones, a costume historian at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum in Los Angeles. "We know from mosaics in A.D. 340, for example, that women in Sicily exercised in gymnasiums, with barbells, in what looks like sports bras," he says. "Women at that time did participate in athletics, which ended with the Medieval era, when women's roles in society became more regulated and restricted." The first sports bra in modern history was born in 1977, when Lisa Lindahl of Vermont got fed up with breast pain while running. Inspired by her husband's jockstrap, she teamed with Polly Smith, a costume designer, and Hinda Schreiber Miller, now a Vermont state senator, to fashion a sports bra from two athletic supporters cut apart and sewn back together. The three launched a modified version, the Jockbra, then quickly renamed it the Jogbra. Sports retailers were skeptical. Women weren't. "We rode the growing wave of women participating in college sports," recalls Miller, linking the emergence of sports bras with the passage in 1972 of Title IX. That landmark legislation prohibited gender discrimination in schools receiving federal assistance, with much of the impact felt in athletics. The sports bra, in short, helped open a door for all women to exercise comfortably and without feeling foolish. Today, sports bras are an essential piece of equipment. Between 2000 and 2002, the most recent figures available from Mintel, a market research group, sales of sports bras grew from $300 million to $400 million, a whopping 33 percent increase in sales. Traditionally, sports bras have fallen into two design types: "compression" or "encapsulation." Many new bras are hybrids.